


Why do men love bitches?

by TulipFever



Category: Carmen - Bizet/Halévy & Meilhac
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:14:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23382151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TulipFever/pseuds/TulipFever
Summary: Micaela, Jose's abandoned fiancee, gives her version of their story.
Relationships: Don José/Micaëla (Carmen)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Why do men love bitches?

They hanged him last Friday. At least it was due to happen then: I don’t know for certain if it did. They don’t have to tell me: I’m not the next of kin. I sat and waited at home, staring at the wall, trying to pray. 

In another day or two, if I don’t hear anything, I will walk over and make sure. But I am not eager to: I have had my fill of waiting outside barracks and prisons, full of idle men for whom a woman waiting is an irresistible target. Even, perhaps especially, if she is crying. At least this will be the last time.

Meanwhile people in the village come up discreetly and pat me on the arm. ‘I’m so sorry, Micaela,’ they say. ‘Keep your chin up, dear. You did all you could.’ And even, ‘Perhaps it’s for the best. You can do far better, I always said. You had a lucky escape. It could have been you that got killed.’ And I smile a little, bravely, through my tears, and nod, and get away as fast as I can. They mean well, I suppose. But do they understand? Not a shadow of it.

He was a good man. I understood him. We might have been happy, if it hadn’t been for _her_.

********

I have always had to trade on being fair-haired and pretty in a way that makes everyone want to look after me, to make a pet of me. It was why Doña Marta took me in in the first place. And why, when she had to follow José to Andalusia with the army, we found friends in the village rather than being shunned as foreigners. And why, when she got too sick to work, and finally too sick for even me to work at anything but looking after her, and then died without a penny, because any pittance she ever managed to save had gone to her son, I have not had to become a beggar or a skivvy or a prostitute. I have stayed respectable. I teach children and sew for the ladies at the big house. Joaquín the miller has taken a fancy to me, as everybody whispers, and needs only a word of encouragement to make me his wife, whereupon I can settle down and get fat and not have to make love more than once a month after the honeymoon is over, if I am any judge. Everyone thinks that would suit me perfectly. It makes me want to scream.

I wanted José. He didn’t see me like that. At least not until _she_ came along.

José … it was always all or nothing with him. And I suppose that was why she picked him out. To take his all … and give him her nothing.

He always cared too much about honour. I loved him for it. But it is no use having great notions of honour if you are poor and ignorant. If only he hadn’t had to go into the army. If only he could have studied something that suited him – not for the priesthood, that would never have turned out well – something that led to a decent profession, a respectable craft, a place where he could have held his head up. But that is the trouble with our country. A priest, a soldier or a thief, that is all the choice you have to better yourself if you are poor. Three different ways of saying a thief.

José wanted respect. With his father dead, with no money and no schooling, where was he going to get it? He could not bear to be called a cheat: that was why he got into that first quarrel, and the knives came out, and he had to leave home. He wasn’t a cheat, and it made him a mark for cheats, all the time. 

My God, that seedy little garrison in Seville. Everyone there was on the take: it was the worst nest of gangsters in the city. They shook down honest traders and winked at crooked ones, visited whores at night and arrested them in the morning. The times I went there, I only avoided being tumbled in the guard-post by looking as if I had no idea what it was all about. (It has always been the same.) And yet, for José, it was a sacred duty to do his best for them: he would have died of shame if he had let down his flag, his officer, his country … He was so proud when he was made corporal: a small apology for all the times they’d laughed at him behind his back. Yet all it meant was that they gave him the worst jobs while they lolled in the barracks smoking. The jobs that were beneath the dignity of the lieutenant, like going into the cigarette factory among a horde of screeching, hair-pulling sluts to try and decide who had started a fight. And getting mixed up with _her_. That gipsy. Carmen. Carmencita.

It’s not as if he didn’t notice what was going on. Every time I came to see him, something would have needled him, got him wound up like a ball of wire, and I would have to disentangle him. He was just like his mother. Doña Marta was kindness itself, but she did see the dark side of things. She complained and expected the worst, and as her strength failed this became her way more and more, until José deserted and confirmed all her worst fears. Then she lay on her bed crying and praying and accusing herself and the Devil and the family bad luck by turns. José would feel as she did, but he was not a man to lie down. He was quick and strong and, more’s the pity, good at fighting. The army taught him to be even better at fighting, and at coming to blows when anything went wrong. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. I never thought for one moment that he would lift his hand to me. I only feared the trouble he would get himself into. I used to grip his hand and get him to look at me and tell me what the trouble really was, and then make him laugh if I could. I would tell him not to expect too much, that we mortals are not put into the world to have an easy time, after all. I would let him know that whether or not he had his comrades’ respect, he had mine. And I would assure him that Doña Marta was well and happy: he used to worry about her just as much as she worried about him. It had been a heavy burden to him to lose his father so young and be obliged to look after his mother, and when the only work he could get took him away from her, his conscience was rubbed raw all the time. José was not a cheerful young man. 

But I used to be able to make him so. Before I left he would be calm and smiling and his hand would hold mine firmly and gently, instead of clawing or drumming on his knee or fidgeting pointlessly with braids and buckles. ‘You understand, Micaela,’ he would say. ‘Thank God you came.’ And then we would be able to talk sensibly about things: what we could do to manage our work or save money, how to understand the people we dealt with. We might sing a song or two from home, from Navarre, before I left, if we could get to some place where no one could hear us. And I felt his warmth, his longing, bent on me, when once or twice, wonderingly, he took a strand of my hair between his fingers.

It was almost settled. We were going to be married. I had brought him his mother’s letter, and was sure that after he read it, he would ask me. But there was something I did not know. That same day, before I even came, the gipsy had put the eye on him. She had taken away his peace of mind, got him to the point where his duty and his crazy honour would leave him struggling in her trap. Just one promise, one evening, one night, and he convinced himself that there could be no going back.

I came again a few days later, breathless, excited, hoping to see his face light up when he glimpsed me. He was gone. He was in the cells, they said, given a month’s lock-up for letting some woman prisoner escape when he was supposed to be guarding her. He’d lost his rank too. And this prisoner, as it turned out, was Carmen. I trudged home as furious as José himself would have been. It was so unfair, so out of proportion. I supposed José had been too soft-hearted and had lowered his guard with this poor girl. Soldiers made mistakes like that every day, and I’d never heard of one being jailed for a month because of it. No, I thought, a soldier of whom no one expected anything better would have got off scot free. José was being punished for not behaving as they’d expected _him_ to. He was being held to his own standards, which were not the standards of anyone else in that company. 

I counted the days, ready to help him pick up his life after they let him out, to go back and patiently start over again. But when I came, I was greeted with spread hands and shrugged shoulders, as well as the usual whistles and leers. He had disappeared the night he was freed and hadn’t come back. Nor had he a week later. He’d deserted, it became clear. I followed up hints from the lieutenant and ended up going, alone, to a tavern where no respectable woman should ever be seen, and handing over good money, to be told that José had gone off with a gang of smugglers, and was in the mountains somewhere, with Carmen. The innkeeper laid his fat finger alongside his nose, commiserating with me – such a nice girl as I was, no competition for a gipsy like that. 

Always all or nothing. You had given your all to the army and they ground you in the dirt. So Carmen promised you freedom, I suppose, to do as you pleased, in the hills, under the open sky. And when at last I came to find you, you were burned up, eaten away inside, because Carmen had done nothing but taunt and torment you, and was about to leave you for a bullfighter, a braggart for whom the world was nothing but a mirror in which to admire his sword and his twirling cape – a much better match for her. Carmencita had promised you the earth, the moon, seventh heaven, and my guess is that you got about two happy nights and the third saw her yawning and impatient and thinking you already well rewarded for your undying devotion. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps you didn’t even get one. 

She could have any man she wanted, but she didn’t want a man at all. She wanted to win. She saw your honour, your loyalty, your determination, as things that made you worth pursuing, because they made you hard to get. So she set about corroding them, with her scornful tongue and her rages and her smoky eyes. To make you hers, she took you to pieces. She broke down the walls and there was no house left to live in. As soon as she had you, she despised you. 

What were you thinking, José? Was it so hard to wait? I couldn’t give myself to you until we were married. The world is very cruel, as you found, to people who accept the rules and then fail in keeping them. If I had once let myself go, the world would never have let me be the only thing I wanted to be: your wife. But if we had only waited until the right moment, we could have made love without end. We could have gone to sleep in each other’s arms every night, and woken up side by side. We could have had children and watched them grow. Just because I had fair hair and a milky skin, José, did you think I had no appetite for it? Just because I was respectable, did you think I was a pallid prudish nun? Would I have been ungenerous, would I ever have turned a chilly back on you, and sneered and let you know you were not man enough? That was Carmen, not me. 

She despised you. She took you to pieces. By the time I found you, to bring you back, because your mother was sinking and was about to die, reaching out her hands for her lost son, there was nothing left. Nothing except the anger that had already nearly destroyed you once. A demon with no house left to live in. For her, you had deserted, made yourself a criminal, murdered – yes, again, you were the one who was saddled with the dirty work, shooting down a luckless guard who was doing his job. And with every crime you committed to try to buy your way into her favour, she despised you more.

How do I know all this about Carmen? I saw her, didn’t I? I was shivering there in the middle of your camp at night, with two of your comrades’ guns trained on me, and Carmen came and looked me up and down. I knew who she was. In her tattered shawl, jingling her gold earrings, curling her lip, turning away with sated contempt, like a leopard that has just eaten its fill of an ox, and hasn’t got enough appetite for a cow as well. I looked into her eyes.

My hair rose on end, José. She wasn’t human. Those were the eyes of a beast of prey. But how were they not human? Because they did not know what fear was. I thought I was brave enough, when I needed to find you: going into the mountains at night with a wild-haired shepherd, who met so few people he hardly knew how to talk, and who turned back half a mile before we got there, too much afraid of those desperadoes to go any further. I knew perfectly well I might be insulted, robbed, murdered. I went on regardless. But I winced and lowered my eyes in front of Carmen. I am soft, after all. I have made myself at home in the world as it is, even when I don’t like it. A soft-bodied creature scurrying within the sheltering tunnels of respectability, even when those tunnels twist and turn and close in so tightly that they seem to form – to deform – what I am. I keep my eyes open for danger. I flinch and dodge, hardly noticing that I am doing so. All the people I meet, the peasants, the pedlars, the priests, do the same: you can see it in their eyes, measuring each other, taking a step outward and then hiding again.

With Carmen there was none of this at all. Her almond eyes stared down the world and she did as she pleased. She had no need to measure herself against anyone. Her eyes seemed to sweep the darkened skies high above the face of the earth like a hawk’s, seeing no obstacles, only the curve of the earth and the stars and the end that she flew towards – her death – with nothing to deflect it. If to be free is to care for nothing, then, yes, Carmen was free.

I could see how those eyes would gather men up into her wake, even though I am a woman. They might carry a man along with her for a wing-beat or two, and then leave him falling, unnoticed.

Why did they light on you, José? Did they even? Perhaps she never truly knew you were there. Or perhaps she saw something like herself in you. You were unafraid: not nearly as much afraid as you needed to be. But once her eyes caught you, she was the stronger and you had to fall.

Perhaps I should even feel honoured that, just for a while, I had the love of a man who seemed worthy prey to Carmen. But I do not. If she was looking for death she might have found it in any number of ways. She had no need to make José her killer.

He came down from the mountain with me, but he no longer saw me or knew me. He only cared about seeing his mother, and then only in a dark, superstitious way that Carmen would have understood. It would be ill-fated not to have a mother’s blessing before she died. He had forgotten the woman Marta was, her follies and her fidgets, her humble work-worn face. In any case, we got there too late. She was still breathing but seemed not to know him, and she died only a few hours later. He stayed for the burial, barely speaking, sodden with drink, hunched at our miserable table. Then he vanished again. His grief for his mother was ghostly, soon forgotten. His real grief was over Carmen. He was in love with her still, or rather in love with the emptiness she had left in him, as a bereaved person tortures himself with the absence of everything he once loved, because the pain is his only happiness. She dragged him towards her like a dark star.

I suppose he asked her one last time to live with him, and she refused. It was over, and Carmen was the last woman in the world to pretend otherwise. So he stabbed her to death. Then he gave himself up. He went on trial in Seville. I went to the courthouse and offered to testify but they never called me. He offered no defence: he confessed to killing Carmen and to the other murder he had committed, so the whole thing was over very soon. 

I wrote to him, and tried to visit him, but I had no word back and I never saw him again. Perhaps he felt he had wronged me too deeply to ask for forgiveness: if so, he was very much mistaken. Or perhaps any part of him that had once cared for me had died already, and to meet again would have been meaningless. I can understand that. But I loved him still. I love him now. 

Was I in love with a madman who would have destroyed himself in the end, and me too, whatever happened? Or with a simple, honest boy who was just too stubborn and foolish to live in the world as it really was? Or perhaps with a brave man who saw his fate and went to meet it? Is that what Carmen would have thought?

I think of José, the way he always took everything head-on, would never lie or trim or let an injustice pass. To be as good as Carmen, I would have had to be more like him. I should have stood at his side screaming like a fishwife at anyone who tried to injure him. I should not have persuaded him to swallow insults to keep his job, or to spare his mother. Let the world do what it would. 

Too late now.

I am keening with my face in my arms at the table, making a sound like a whipped dog. I hope no one can hear. The door-frame of this sad little hovel is high enough: I could hang myself, too, without any trouble. Or go and drown myself in Joaquín’s mill-pond to show him what I think of him. Carmen wouldn’t hesitate. What is there left for me, without José’s quick hands, his stormy eyes, his loyal irreconcilable heart?

To be a humble uncomplaining spinster in this miserable village: poor little Micaela, who loved a scoundrel and never got over it, such a spare, saintly life, an example to us all … to make young girls shudder … yes, that is what waits for me.

I wish them all in hell. I loved you, José.


End file.
